


Descent

by fiach_dubh



Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout 3
Genre: Canon levels of violence, Depression, Suicide, Swearing, alcohol and drug use, lone wanderer gets fucked up by the wastelands, referenced attempted rape/non-con
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-18
Updated: 2015-07-18
Packaged: 2018-04-10 00:14:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,215
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4369781
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fiach_dubh/pseuds/fiach_dubh
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sweet little Vault girl gets fucked up by the wastes.</p><p>This fic deals with mature themes. Potential triggers are listed in the notes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Descent

**Author's Note:**

> Descent is a little story told in snatches of time about a Lone Wanderer who becomes depressed and suicidal because of her experiences. There is one explicit reference to suicide, an episode of unhealthy drug and alcohol abuse, and an implied reference to attempted rape.
> 
> Also includes an MC who acts badly because she's in pain.
> 
> Mostly it's just sad and a little bitter.

This is how it was: The door slamming shut behind her with a dull and final-sounding thud, and the air in her lungs so dusty, and the light, the light, burning in her eyes. She was all fear and confusion and then there was the sky above her, grey and choked and nothing at all like steel and there was no sensation of solidity on any side and the light was so bright and…  
Without even knowing it, she was on her knees, hammering on the door, begging to people who couldn’t hear her and might not care if they did.  
‘Amata, Amata, please, please. Overseer Almodavar , I’m sorry, let me back in. I’ll be good. I promise I’ll be good. Please. I’ll die out here.’ A million other gabbled things, pleading, begging. No threats. She wasn’t the type for threats.  
She hammered with the flat of her hands until they hurt too much, and then she went to her fists until the knuckles split and bled and only then did she stop. Only then.  
When she stopped she stared out over the broken road, at the fallen pylons, with blank and staring eyes, before abruptly retching into the dirt.  
There wasn’t anything in her stomach to bring up, only a thin and bitter-tasting slime. She’d already brought up anything solid in there when she’d killed for the first time.  
She’d felt it hard then and she was feeling it worse now. A face she had known – not liked, but known all her life – disappearing into a spray of blood, and then the awful sound of a body hitting the floor.  
She retched again.  
“No,” she murmured, barely coherent. “Not doing that again. Not one more person.”  
She got to her feet, trembling. “Gonna find my dad,” she said, out loud. “Gonna fix it all. Not gonna kill anyone else for him.”  
By the time she was at Megaton raiders had forced her to break that promise to herself three times.

*

Sweet little Vault girl doesn’t drink. Sweet little Vault girl doesn’t even swear. She says ‘darn’ and ‘sugar’ and once or twice even ‘oh, my giddy aunt’.  
Sweet little Vault girl blushes fiercely and trembles with embarrassment and fear the first time Jericho tells her she ‘has a sweet little ass’ and a ‘fuckable mouth’. Sweet little Vault girl can’t make eye contact with Nova, but is grateful when Nova peels Jericho away, all the same.  
The first time Sweet little Vault girl tastes hard liquor she mistakes vodka for water, and it goes all over the bar.  
Sweet little Vault girl thinks she can fix everything with a smile and the right words. Sweet little Vault Girl is wrong.  
*

The problem was that after a while killing became easy. The problem was never that it made her shake, want to cry, want to puke, hate herself. That was how she knew she was still herself, the sweet little girl who gave away her favourite treat to avoid a fight. She hated it, but did it because these drugged-up, broken messes of people never gave her a choice, never let her decide to walk away. Sometimes she could tell herself she was doing them a favour even.  
Maybe that’s where it started.  
Because one day she looked at the latest body and realised it didn’t matter. It was a lump of bloody meat that just happened to wearing some pretty dreadful armour. When she thought about it, she couldn’t remember the last time death had mattered to her.  
While she was realising this, Three Dog came on the radio, talking her up, telling the world what she had done, calling her all kinds of hero. She stared at the dead a little longer, willing herself to feel something, anything, but nothing came.  
*

She was young, so she thought in clichés from songs and the novels in the Vault. She liked to lay in bed in her house and look up at the rusting metal of her ceiling and speak platitudes to herself.  
‘There is a bruise over my heart’, and ‘My soul is scarred’.  
Silly things. Overdramatic. But true enough. True enough, as these things go.  
She didn’t have the words for what was really happening to her. Maybe there aren’t words for it.  
*  
The first time she ever got drunk (and high, too, let’s not forget that) was after her father died. He was there, all the time, sitting in her head like some great heavy animal, turning everything damp and hot and rotten with its breath.  
So after everyone had done talking at her, done telling her what she needed to do, what she owed her father (and what about what he owed her? No-one talked about that) she walked herself to Rivet City and sat down and started in on the drinking pretty solidly.  
When Belle threw her out of the Muddy Rudder, she stumbled upstairs, the world around her seeming like it was on a two second delay, her hands feeling huge and clumsy, and she bought Cindy Cantelli out of jet and med-x.  
It was fortunate, perhaps, that she didn’t take it all before Harkness found her huddled on the flight deck. He took the rest of her stuff gently out of her hands and dumped it overboard. She screamed and hit at him, and then tried kissing him, but he just quietly propped her up and put her in the bed at The Weatherly, then watched all night as she came down and sobered up.  
‘To make sure you didn’t die on me’ he said, in the morning.  
“My dad died,” she said, her voice raw and rusty, her eyes aching.  
“I know,” he said, and it was only later she realised that Three Dog – fucking Three Dog – had told the whole Wasteland while she still struggled to understand it herself.  
It wasn’t their pain. It wasn’t theirs. But everyone – everyone – acted like it was, coming up to her no matter what she was doing and telling her they were so sorry, they couldn’t believe a great man like that was just gone, who would look out for the Wasteland now? Well, at least they still had her, a few would finish off. The Savior of the Wastes.  
Well, fuck them. It wasn’t theirs. It was hers. And fuck them for only caring about who was going to fix their messes and bandage up their wounds.  
She still did good, though. It was like she couldn’t do anything else. Every time she tried – just a little thievery here, or bullying a man for caps there – it was like she heard her dad in her head, disapproving. He was always very good at disapproving.  
*  
Finally, at last, a long time after she had begged at the door to be let in, the vault reopened for her. She fixed their problems, like she fixed everything these days. Quickly, and with a sense of frustrated disdain. She wondered how she’d ever lived under these thin lights, wrapped in all that steel. She looked at their skin, several shades lighter than it should be, the darker people appearing unhealthily ashy, the lighter people looking half dead. They were all so clean and soft and unscarred. She had lost count of her scars.  
When Amata told her she couldn’t stay any more she wasn’t even surprised.  
She had kissed Amata in the close warm darkness of a childhood bedroom, and now they had nothing in common any more. There was nothing for her here.  
The thing was, she was no longer sure there was anything anywhere for her.  
*  
One day she realised she’d missed her 20th birthday. It had flown away, forgotten. She’d never marked her pipboy to remember it, because it was hers, and other people remembered it for her.  
In all that time, only one person had touched her with any kindness. Harkness, when she got herself fucked up. Even her own father hadn’t hugged her, too busy with what needed to be done. Probably thought there’d be more time when it was finished, only there hadn’t been.  
Everyone else who had made contact with her had done it to hurt.  
*  
She had been alone since she left the vault. She’d even sent the sweet dog away to stay with settled people, because what safety would that little thing have with her? It’d die, probably get eaten by whatever fucker took it down. It was safer alone, not for her, but for other people.  
She was a magnet for every nasty cruel thing in the wastes, and the wastes were all cruel and nasty.  
*  
She was so often too late. By decades, sometimes, following a distress signal to find nothing but bones. Sad, but she could cope with it. She hadn’t even been born when they died of starvation or thirst or radiation sickness or whatever it was that took them. She could never have helped.  
The ones that lay heavy on her were the ones where she was only days late, stumbling in on blood thick with flies and corpses still recognisably human, mouths and eyes open to the skies. She never did cry for them, but she’d close their eyes and sometimes put a blanket over their bodies, if there was one to spare. There was no-one to tell, no big authority that could fix it and make it better and clear away the mess and put the bad people in a prison. Oh, the Enclave promised that they would bring that, but she knew it wasn’t true. She wanted it to be true too badly for it to be something that could ever happen.  
She played the radio loud so she didn’t have to hear the silence, so she didn’t have to think. But she preferred Agatha’s station, because Agatha never told the world about her and her actions.  
*  
Sometimes she went without speaking for days.  
*  
She shot Alistair Tenpenny with dry eyes. She took everything he had, leaving him naked. Pathetic old man, wrinkled and sad and dead. That’s for everything, you piece of shit, I hate, I hate, I hate…  
She kicked at his body until her ankle started to hurt, and then she hauled his surprisingly light body over the edge of his balcony and watched it break apart on the ground.  
*  
“You’d better be fucking dying if you’re bothering me,”  
“Not dying, Doc,” she said, staring past him, at the old nursing posters on the walls. Wondering if the people back then ever felt like this. Knew what to do about it. “I just think I’m really fucked up. In my head.”  
“You and everyone else kid. “  
She looked into his face, found nothing there but dismissal.  
“Yeah,” she said. “Yeah. Sure.”  
*  
She was back again with Doc Church a few days later, this time quiet, body all tight muscles and trembling pain.  
“Don’t fucking say a word,” she said before he opened his foul cruel mouth. “Just fix me up.”  
Her clothes were torn. She was… hurt.  
He was surprisingly gentle. Did the necessary. Then.  
“Sorry to ask you,” he said all slow “But do I need to do an internal exam?”  
“No,” she said. “they were dead before they got quite that far.”  
He nodded and that’s where he left it and that was good, good it’s not like she needed the sympathy or the kindness and she wouldn’t have taken it if it were on offer.  
*  
Fawkes was big. Fawkes was strong. Fawkes could take a lot of damage. He battled his way to the Enclave base for her, an act which caused a tiny stir in the scar tissue that used to be her heart. No-one, she thought, no-one would ever put their hands on me again with him by her side. Not one single solitary soul.  
So, not alone any more, which felt strange, but stopped the thundering rushing feeling in her chest, and the pulling sensation in her skull.  
And she’d be a liar if she said the nervous looks the complacent people of Megaton and Rivet City give her didn’t make her tremble all over with satisfaction. How about that, then. Your hero consorts with Supermutants.  
It was cruel, that part of her, and she knew it, but she fed it anyway. Not one of these people really cared for her, they only ever gave a shit if she helped them. Bled for them, hurt for them, risked herself for them. Scaring them a little helps.  
She’d feel bad for what it did to Fawkes, if she had anything left for others at all.  
*  
When she realised the radiation in the purifier would kill her, finish her off right where her dad died, something finally stirred inside her again. It took a while for her to recognise it as relief.  
And best of all, it wasn’t suicide. It was nobility. Heroic self-sacrifice. No-one would suspect or be disappointed in what she did. Where raiders and Talon Company and Enclave and Mutants had all failed her, the sweet and impersonal embrace of lethal radiation would finally, finally do what she’d been wanting for so long.  
She tried not to smile as she went in. But when she punched in the code and collapsed, her last thought was ‘finally’.


End file.
